The Birthday Cake Killers: Inside the 1973 Victor Massacre
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In November 1973, Douglas Gretzler and Willie Steelman murdered nine people in Victor, California, including the Parkin family and their neighbors. The homicide investigation revealed a brutal massacre where victims Walter Parkin, Joanne Parkin, their children Lisa and Robert, Richard and Wanda Earl, their children Debbie and Ricky, and Mark Lang were systematically executed in their own home. This killing spree began in Arizona with multiple murders across the Southwest, totaling seventeen victims. The suspects used eyewitness elimination as their primary motive, leaving a trail of bodies from Phoenix to Sacramento before their arrest at the Clunie Hotel.
Two drifters walked into a family home during a bowling night and turned it into the crime scene that would haunt a tiny California town forever. After shooting nine people, including two children, the killers sat down in the kitchen and ate birthday cake. This is the story of how a depressed kid from the Bronx and a brain-damaged ex-con from California formed one of the deadliest partnerships in American criminal history, racking up seventeen bodies in less than a month while crisscrossing the Southwest like their personal hunting ground.
#TrueCrime #VictorMassacre #GretzlerSteelman #CaliforniaMurders #1973Murders #UnsolvedNoMore #MassMurder
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | November 6, 1973, a family returns home from a bowling night out to find their babysitter held hostage. |
| 0:10.0 | Within hours, nine people are dead. |
| 0:13.0 | Two children executed on a bed. |
| 0:16.0 | Adults bound and shot in a closet. |
| 0:19.0 | And when it's over, the killers go to the kitchen and eat |
| 0:22.2 | chocolate cake. This is the story of the greatest murder spree you've never heard of. |
| 0:53.3 | Thank you. There's this case from 1973 that nobody talks about. 17 people dead, nine of them killed in a single night in a tiny California town. |
| 1:00.2 | The whole thing just disappeared into history. |
| 1:03.1 | You know how we know all about Ted Bundy, the Zodiac, Manson. |
| 1:08.4 | Well, these guys flew completely under the radar. It's 1973, Nixon's imploding over |
| 1:14.5 | Watergate. The oil crisis is hitting. The whole country feels like it's coming apart at the seams. |
| 1:20.7 | Somewhere in that chaos, two guys meet in Denver and decide to go on a road trip that's going |
| 1:26.2 | to leave bodies scattered across three states. |
| 1:29.3 | Their names are Douglas Gretzler and Willie Steelman. They weren't killing for some twisted |
| 1:34.7 | sexual thing, which is often the case. They weren't trying to get famous. They were killing because |
| 1:40.5 | they didn't want witnesses. As simple as that. Douglas Gretzler was born in |
| 1:46.0 | 1951 in the Bronx, middle-class family. When he was a teenager, his older brother died by suicide, |
| 1:52.7 | and that broke something in Douglas. He got diagnosed with anxiety and depression at 13, |
| 1:59.4 | which back then basically meant nobody did anything about it. |
| 2:03.7 | By his late teens, he was doing mescaline and LSD, just trying to escape his own mind. |
| 2:09.9 | By 1970, he gets married in Miami. He has a daughter. December 26, 1972, he just, up and leaves. |
| 2:18.3 | Doesn't say a word to his wife or his baby, waits until they go out, |
... |
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